Flaming Creatures
- Director: Jack Smith
CGiii Comment
Like a wine connoisseur who traces essences of wild cactus and greenfly in a French Chardonnay - the film buff will spout on about metaphor in film, the genius of the underground.
Pure and utter tosh.
Whilst this catastrophe may now have achieved historical importance (only because it is old), it has no artistic merit whatsoever.
Only for the arrogantly pretentious masquerading as film academics.
Trailer...
The(ir) Blurb...
One of the most controversial short film of all time, an experiment contains scenes of a group of people who do things that are considered bizarre, strange and taboo, including sexual activity, Jack Smith's Flaming Creatures is regarded comedy with setting a haunted music studio.
Jonas Mekas, along with Ken and Flo Jacobs, was arrested for screening Flaming Creatures in 1964, and the obscenity case that followed would become a central episode of the New American Cinema. The film’s images, idiosyncratically framed and etherealized by the outdated stock they were shot on, feature the extravagantly costumed voluptuaries of the title as they dance, preen, and, most strikingly, take part in a pansexual mock orgy. “Flaming Creatures is that rare modern work of art: it is about joy and innocence,” wrote Susan Sontag. “To be sure, this joyousness, this innocence is composed out of themes which are—by ordinary standards—perverse, decadent, at the least highly theatrical and artificial. But this, I think, is precisely how the film comes by its beauty and its modernity.”
Cast & Characters
Francis Francine as Himself;
Sheila Bick as Delicious Dolores;
Joel Markman as Our Lady of the Docks;
Mario Montez as The Spanish Girl;
Arnold Rockwood as Arnold;
Judith Malina as The Fascinating Woman;
Marian Zazeela as Maria Zazeela